Rootless cosmopolitan | Reading wildly | 'Obscure enough to be left in the sweetest of solitudes.' — De Quincey
London
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‘Sometimes, I find places in the translation that make me think, “So that’s what it was,” or, “So that’s what I was trying to say”. It’s like a dream. It feels comforting, like something is being cured deep in my subconscious.’
—Hiromi Ito
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I like personal, fragmentary, autobiographical Agamben more than the big systematic works. I’m looking forward to Agamben’s notes from Heidegger’s Le Thor seminars, mixed with recollections of the place, walking, memory and youth.
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‘. . . eventually it began to emerge in the form of that obsessive image - and all the while it was cunningly erasing its tracks, because impositions invariably generate resistance.’
from Mario Levrero’s ‘The Luminous Novel’
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Anthony retweeted
Nice to see "the first English publication of these journals in their entirety" — Cesare Pavese's 'The Craft of Living' — came out earlier this year, but list price (even if C$ ...) 100.00 ... oof. utppublishing.com/doi/10.313…
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Anthony retweeted
“Thus I have lost my life writing, says Derrida, but perhaps it was the best I could do with this my long damn life… and this fixed idea, wanting to write, later too : to have to write (“you must write”) was no doubt the most beautiful binding agent between us…”
— Mayröcker
“I think, I say to EJ, that only 1 single sunrise continues to keep us apart, in the meantime I make my way through this alphabet world like 1 breeze...”
— Friederike Mayröcker
from The Communicating Vessels (tr. Alexander Booth)
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Anthony retweeted
“As I read, my self-consciousness is not only suspended, but temporarily abolished by the vertigo of another’s language. I am simply its conduit, its gutter. This is a pleasure.
Sometimes my sadness in reading is that I can’t stay.”
— Lisa Robertson, Nilling
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Han's thirty-second book. Simone Weil, edited until she agrees with him. Just read Weil. The notebooks, even the Thibon cut of Gravity and Grace.
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RT @nicoscosc: “Animals fantasticate me. They are time that does not measure itself.”
(Lispector, Água Viva)
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Anthony retweeted
“Round, slow, uncountable by a calendar, since that is the way that a cow crosses a field.”
— Lispector, The Apple in the Dark
Went back to this passage after coming across it in Jean-Luc Nancy’s “The Accident and the Season.”
(trans. Benjamin Moser)
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A nod today to Zenodotus of Ephesus who probably served as the first librarian and, so far as known, invented the idea of ordering items alphabetically.
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Anthony retweeted
Love both the wide-eyed excitement of Herodotus, and the narrow-eyed scepticism of the German scholar, which concludes that the marching column of the Persian army under Xerxes would have been 420 miles long, with the front reaching Thermopylae while the rear left Susa.
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“AEH: I moved house four times, once, it was said, because a stranger spoke to me on my train to work. It wasn’t so, but it was the truth about me.”
- Tom Stoppard, ‘The Invention of Love’
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“Housman: It's where we're nearest to our humanness. Useless knowledge for its own sake.”
— Tom Stoppard, ‘The Invention of Love’
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"AEH: Textual criticism is the crown and summit of scholarship. Most people, though not enough, find it dry and dull, but it is the only reason for existence for a Latin professor." — Tom Stoppard, 'The Invention of Love'
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Jean Rhys being furious with Diana Athill that Wide Sargasso Sea went out with two unnecessary words: “then” and “quite”.
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I do not remember such hot weather as we have had this summer. Mr Wood says Oxford saw no rain from 30 June to 27 July, and none after that until 9 August. Several scholars have gone mad with heat and strong drink.
From Ruth Scurr's John Aubrey.
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